The fabric of American society is being tested this year—straining against a deluge of discord, division, intolerance, violence, and fear. In the coming months, the forces that want to pull us apart are likely to get even louder.
We believe the true story of this nation, its values, and its people is being drowned out as never before—we’re at risk of losing sight of who we really are.
But we also believe that each of us has the power to do something about it.
Through November, StoryCorps and Upworthy will release a series of real-life stories told by everyday Americans that speak to our best selves. Stories that amplify love over hate and empathy over fear. Stories that build bridges of understanding between people and help us recognize our shared humanity.
We’re asking every American to step up and participate not just by sharing these stories with others, but also by reaching out to someone different from them to ask about where they come from, what they care about, and who they love.
Asking questions and listening intently to other people’s stories is a powerful force for good. If we all take one hour this year to do it, we’ll strengthen our national fabric at a time when the divisions seem insurmountably wide. Because when we take the time to listen to each other’s stories, we see the beauty, poetry, and grace hiding in plain sight all around us.
During these challenging times, this series will inspire us to imagine something better for ourselves and for our country.
It will remind us #WhoWeAre.
Dave Isay
Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser
Founder, StoryCorps
Co-Founders, Upworthy
Produced with support from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and Delta Air Lines.
Yesterday, Facebook announced another change to its algorithm, this time to suppress clickbait — headlines that fool you into clicking but don’t deliver the goods.
We can all agree: No one likes clickbait. That’s why I apologized 17 months ago for unleashing this style of headlines on the internet — and it’s why Upworthy shifted away from clickbait in early 2015 toward stories that engage readers AND keep their attention.
We’re still not 100% perfect, I’m sure, but we’re committed to getting it right out of respect for our community and the trusted relationship we’ve built with them.
Here are our most shared stories this week:
We’re also really proud that the percentage of folks who land on Upworthy stories and spend real time with them has increased since then — we’re now well ahead of the industry average on this measure.
In early 2015, we shifted our strategy dramatically to focus on video. So while traffic to Upworthy.com has dropped significantly from the highest points in late 2013, our reach is wider than ever.
In June, we achieved 329,749,434 video views! You can see the dramatic growth in this chart, which shows our video growth since January 2015:
We’re pretty proud of the work done by our (very) small but (very) mighty team. That growth is even more impressive than when our traffic spike earned us “the fastest-growing media company of all time.”
This chart shows article pageviews versus video views in their first 15 months:
We’re happy that Facebook is depressing content from clickbait shops and helping important stories that leave readers satisfied soar.
10 tips straight from the editor who reads your pitches.
By Jenni Whalen Gritters, Editor
At Upworthy, our mission is to drive massive amounts of attention to the topics that matter most.
We’re telling stories for a better world because we believe that we’re all part of the same story.
So far, we’ve inspired thousands of people to read about standing up to bullies. We’ve held big banks accountable, tackled tough topics like climate change, and challenged the world to do better when it comes to the stigma surrounding mental illness. And we’ve done this through surprising, emotional stories that have a visual element and are both meaningful and shareable (that’s the definition of “Upworthy”).
Did someone say emotions?
But to make the kind of difference we want to make in the world, we need to go even further. This year, we’re investing heavily in original storytelling that supports our mission. And that’s where you and your talents come in.
If you’re a content creator and you want to join us in this mission to make the world better together, we want you to pitch us!
Send us your best ideas for written stories, comics, and photo roundups. We even take personal essays. In fact, here’s a guide to what we’re looking for. It also explains how to pitch us.
As the lead editor for Upworthy’s freelance program, it’s my job to sort through all the story pitches that get sent our way.
Right now, we get more than 100 pitches each week, but we only pick a handful of those stories to be created and featured on Upworthy. So as you dream up your best Upworthy pitch, we want to explain why we pick certain story ideas and not others.
Key things really make certain pitches stand out from the crowd for us. Here’s a look at some of those things plus my best tips for landing a story on our site:
1. Read Upworthy before you pitch.
Even reading three or four stories will give you a sense for our unique tone, story structure, and the kinds of stories we’re interested in running. This is also covered in our pitch packet: We’re specifically looking for stories that are surprising, meaningful, visual, and shareable. Not every story we run will check all four of those boxes, but most stories will check at least three.
How we feel when your story checks all the boxes.
This goes hand in hand with writing your pitch. We can generally tell from just two sentences whether or not you’ll be able to nail the Upworthy voice in a story on our site, so read a few of our stories before you jump in, and make every sentence count!
2. We’re looking for stories, not topics.
We get pitches about topics all the time:
“I really want to write about why lilies look beautiful in the spring.”
“I want to talk about how hiking improves health.”
What we’re really interested in — rather than just topics — are pitches that contain narrative stories.
To move from an awesome idea to a topic to a story, you’ll want to read the competition’s work on the subject, do deep research, search for characters and conflict, and find something truly surprising and emotionally moving.
Instead of reading about lilies in the spring, we want to hear about the guy who stood on the street corner and handed out lilies to everyone he met for a week for an incredibly surprising reason. Give us excitement, surprise, and feelings by showing us in your pitch specifically and concretely what you’d like to publish on our site.
3. Pare down your “pitch description” to three incredible sentences.
Pretend you’re standing in an elevator with us and we only have 30 seconds to talk before our next meeting. What would you tell us about your story in those few seconds? Ideally, you’d start with the coolest and most surprising details — the things that make the story incredibly fascinating. By the time we hop out of the elevator, we should feel like we can’t miss your story.
GIF from “The Office.”
This goes for written pitches too. Be concise and spend time explaining your story in three carefully crafted sentences. By the time I get to the end of those sentences, I should be itching to learn more.
4. Spend time on your sample headline.
Our Editorial Director, Amy O’Leary, often says we’re in a “street fight for human attention” and that we need to give our stories their best shot at success by packaging them with care.
The same goes for your pitches: When we’re reading through a lineup of 50 pitches, we often scan headlines first to pick up on the highest potential options. If we read only your headline, would we want to read more? And if we dive deeper, does your pitch deliver on the promise of that headline?
5. If you’re pitching a list, give some item samples.
Ah, the listicle. We really love smartly written listicles and have published a number of great list-structured pieces from freelancers.
But if you’re pitching a list, give us a sample of two to three of the items so we can get a sense of where your story is headed. If the list items aren’t surprising and unique, we probably won’t take the story.
6. If you’re pitching a personal narrative, consider surprise.
We’ve also seen great success from personal narratives by freelancers who bring unique expertise or experiences to Upworthy’s readers.
However, we hope you’ll think hard before you pitch us a personal narrative. We only publish a few of these each month, so we look for people who can offer:
A surprising new take on an experience we’ve all had
A special level of expertise on a topic that’s currently in the public consciousness
A fresh take on a surprising personal experience that people don’t usually talk about
This baby is so surprised and joyful! Help us be like this baby.
7. If you’re pitching a story that’s been covered elsewhere, explain your secret sauce.
Sometimes we get a pitch for an excellent story — then we’re sad to find that it’s already been covered 10 times in the past week by 10 different publications.
It’s almost impossible these days to run a story about a topic that’s NEVER ever been discussed on the internet. We get that. But if you’re pitching a story that’s already been covered elsewhere, think through how you’ll give us a fresh take on the story and what the “Upworthy angle” might be. We don’t just want to repeat someone else’s work!
8. Always include information about visuals in your pitch.
We have lots of data to prove that visual stories generally do better on the interwebs; people love to SEE what they’re reading. This is a big part of the pitching process, so please don’t pitch us if you don’t have photos to include in the piece or at least ideas for photos (that you have access to) that could work in the piece.
9. Read through your pitch before you submit it.
This might seem like a “duh” item, but lots of typos come through our freelance airwaves. Please, please re-read your pitch before sending it through. Edit for grammar. Do not send us pitches addressed to “Unworthy.” (Yes, we know Upworthy autocorrects to Unworthy.) Make sure your pitch is a piece of strong writing in and of itself.
How we feel when we get “Unworthy” emails. GIF from “Glee.”
10. Don’t get discouraged if and when your pitch gets rejected.
We reject so, so many pitches every day, and there are many reasons for those rejections. Usually it’s not you, it’s us. We have a finite budget, so we have to be incredibly picky.
Sometimes your story will almost make it to the pile of chosen stories, but another pitch will edge it out just slightly. Sometimes we’ll have written on that topic five times already this month, so we’ll prioritize other pitches. Sometimes the tone of your pitch might not be just right. Sometimes the story won’t be surprising enough. Sometimes there won’t be visuals included in the pitch.
Whatever the reason, every person who has written for Upworthy as a freelancer in the past has had a pitch rejected by us at some point. Even our staff writers have story ideas rejected on a daily basis.
The most important thing is not to give up after that rejection. Take our notes, read the site, and come back with polished pitches that are even stronger. It can take a while to get the hang of the Upworthy way, and we hope you don’t get discouraged or take it personally.
GIF from “Full House.”
And remember: This is just how things work at Upworthy.
Other publications have other rules and recommendations; this is just our best rule book for pitching Upworthy with your most awesome work.
We look forward to seeing your pitches in the coming weeks!
If you’re a PR professional or someone looking to have a campaign covered, you can email [email protected]. We get so many of those emails that we can’t always respond, but we do our best.
At this time, we aren’t looking for original video pitches within this program. If you’ve already made a video that you think could be a good fit for Upworthy, you can email that video to [email protected] for potential licensing opportunities.
Eli Pariser, Upworthy co-CEO commencement speech to the graduating class of 2016 at Dominican UniversityHello, Class of 2016!
Let’s kick this off in a way befitting this moment in history. Please take out your phones.
Now, I want to ask everyone here to take a selfie. I’m going to do it too. Post it to Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat it to friends if you want. Tag it hashtag #du16 and actually, add to that #ididit.
OK, ready? Go.
We’ll come back to that.
My name’s Eli. I’m the cofounder and co-CEO of a media start-up called Upworthy. Upworthy’s mission is to connect people to stories that matter and, by doing that, to connect them to one another. Today, we’re reaching 200 million people every month. You might have seen us — maybe more than you wish — in your Facebook feed.
I started Upworthy because I’ve always believed that the way things get better, the we solve our biggest problems, is by connecting to one another, connecting to a sense of hope, and taking action together to stand up for what we believe in. That’s been my focus ever since I graduated 15 years ago: building citizen movements, figuring out how to use the internet for good, writing a book about the structure of social media, and then applying that all to Upworthy.
I’m here today to share a bit about what I’ve learned since my own college graduation. And, in particular, to talk about one of the most important things I’ve come to understand from that work.
I want to talk about what it means to matter, why you matter, and how important it is that you know that. And because we have 15 minutes, we’ll also have time for another selfie.
I spend my life looking for and lifting up positive stories. And what I’m about to tell you is, ultimately, a positive story. But every story starts with a problem, a challenge. And I want to talk about one of the big ones facing you all.
You’re here today to step into your future. And I have to say it straight: Your future is a pretty weird, unsettling place.
Technology seems to be reshaping every aspect of our lives.
You don’t need me to tell you that you’re graduating into a highly mediated world. Apps and algorithms will guide some of your most important life experiences — the places where you meet the people you love and suffer some of your worst humiliations. Your favorite possessions are likely to be snippets of media, memories that live in the cloud, that live nowhere.
And while this is a huge benefit when you’re trying to order a pizza at 3 a.m. or get a cheap car ride, there’s an irony to it. At a time when we’ve never been more connected, a lot of people feel isolated and alone. Selfies, in some ways, illustrate that — pictures of you up close in your own frame.
There’s another important way technology’s shaping your future. You’re going to directly compete for jobs with robots and code, science-fiction style. This is already happening, of course. But you’re going to live to see lots of lines of work that we all think of as permanent go away in rapid succession, just like the landline telephone and the iPod and that song “Call Me Maybe” you probably remember from freshman year. Whole occupations, from radio DJ to travel agent to postal worker are being replaced by hyper-efficient technological systems, just like Carly Rae Jepsen.
You’re getting in a driverless car to the future.
If this all makes you uneasy, it probably should. It makes a lot of people uneasy. When you look at America today, it’s hard not to see a country that is, in many quarters, gripped by a kind of deep fear.
It’s a gnawing, 3 a.m.-tossing-and-turning sensation. And the core of that fear is the mother of all fears: the fear that we just don’t matter.
That we’re not necessary anymore. That no one will notice when we’re gone. That when we go, the car will just keep on driving.
I promise I’m not going to leave you in the clutches of despair. BUT — while we’re on the topic of bad news, might as well keep going.
One of the most interesting things I’ve come across recently is a body of scientific evidence suggesting that this kind of existential fear makes everything — and more importantly everyone — worse.
The prevailing psychological theory in this area is called Terror Management Theory. And Terror Management Theory offers a really revealing explanation of human identity and how we react to fear.
Let me give you an example of what it looks like in action.
In an experiment, half of a group of Christian students are asked to write about their own deaths. Then, they’re all asked to rate how much they want to work with a group of students from Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu backgrounds.
When the experimenters collate their results, they see something fascinating — something that actually explains so much of the conflict and difficulty in the world. The students who had just focused on their own deaths are much more prejudiced, more bigoted, and more rejecting than the ones who didn’t.
This isn’t about a particular religion — the experiment has been repeated many times with different cultures and contexts at play. And the fundamental result is the same across nearly 300 studies. When people think about death, they judge people who aren’t like them more harshly.
So, why? The core idea of Terror Management Theory is simple: We all deeply want to live. But death is inevitable.
Being human is, essentially, scary: We are fragile, vulnerable creatures made up of flesh and bone. Unlike other animals, we know how tenuous life can be. We know that we’re only here for a short time. That’s terrifying.
To manage that fear, we turn to cultures and belief systems and identity. These things give life meaning. They grant what psychologists call “symbolic immortality.” It’s a great phrase: “symbolic immortality.”
So, when we’re reminded that we’ll die someday, we cling tighter to our identity and our beliefs as a literal lifeline. And the flip side of that is that we’re more antagonistic to people and ideas that might be threatening to who we are and what we believe.
Fear that you don’t matter increases hatred of others.
So that’s Terror Management Theory. And I think it explains a lot.
For example, you’re graduating into a country that is, right this moment, stumbling its way through a sloppy, unseemly midlife identity crisis, with a reality-show ringleader at the steering wheel. This political upheaval is driven by a lot of angry people who don’t understand why their lives turned out the way they did and want someone to pay for it.
And many of the people driving it are older, working-class white men whose jobs are being replaced by automated manufacturing systems and who can’t get re-hired. Is it a stretch to wonder if what’s driving the bigotry and Islamophobia and misogyny we’re seeing from these guys is their worry that they don’t matter any more?
This fear of annihilation — and the clinging to identity that comes along with it — also explains a lot of the worst things about our online culture. We troll for Likes and post revealing pictures to counter this fear. We seek to dominate, to bully, because showing that you squashed someone seems to prove that you’re here, that you exist.
And when you add up these cultural and political changes, you get a system that’s tilting away from the principles that democracy is built on — the idea that we must honor every voice, that every person is created equal.
It’s a vicious cycle: The more we fear, the more we fight; the more we fight, the more we fear.
But the picture isn’t all bleak. Remember, I run Upworthy. I’m not going to let you leave depressed.
Here’s the good news: There’s a flip side to all of this. There’s a way to reverse that cycle.
So let me tell you about another study.
In October of 2008, researchers asked a bipartisan group of people to watch the presidential debates between Obama and McCain. They separated their subjects into two groups. One group just rated the debates. As you’d expect, the Republicans thought Obama did poorly and McCain did well, and the Democrats felt that McCain was awful and Obama was amazing.
But the other group was asked to first spend some time thinking about things they VALUE about themselves, like creativity and sense of humor and — totally outside of politics — things they care about as people. And in this group, something striking, almost unbelievable happened. The Republicans and Democrats just about saw eye to eye. The Democrats were more willing to admit that McCain had some admirable traits, and the Republicans were willing to concede that Obama had some excellent moments.
What this study shows about the impact of remembering that you matter is profound.
When you remember that you matter, you’re less threatened by opposing ideas, and you’re more inclined to embrace them instead of rejecting them.
(And actually, when Dominican works with the Presidential Debate Commission this fall to figure out what a presidential debate looks like for the social media era — an undertaking that is so important and so exciting — perhaps people should think first about why they like themselves.)
The McCain-Obama study is just one of many studies that demonstrate the powerful effect that believing we matter has on the way we behave, especially toward those who are different from us. One study has even proven that people whose sports teams have just won are much less racially biased than people whose teams have just lost.
I don’t think the importance of the takeaway here can be overstated: When we’re affirmed in who we are, when we believe that we matter, we relax. We’re more open to new ideas, other ways of seeing things. We’re more accepting of each other. We feel safe. Our subconscious bias goes down. Our empathy goes up. Instead of seeing stereotypes, we can see and accept people as individual human beings.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how empathy is important. I believe that. But the fact is that self-worth is empathy’s gateway drug. Only when we’re not feeling personally threatened can we see how the world looks to others.
So let’s sum up where we are so far. Technological change is stirring an existential fear. That fear is stoking the wildfires in our politics and society. But when we’re reminded that we matter, things get better. We’re more likely to act as good citizens. We’re more likely to be our best selves. We’re more likely to actually solve those problems.
So having a sense of self-worth isn’t some kind of new-age, hippy-dippy thing. It’s important — and maybe even key to saving democracy and solving the biggest problems we face.
But that brings us to a very big question.
What is the right basis for valuing yourself?
This is a harder question than it first appears. Ultimately, it’s a question you have to answer on your own.
But since you invited me to come speak, I’ll tell you my opinion.
The reason you matter is not your occupation. And it’s not about what you’ve achieved — unless you think that children have no basis for self-worth.
It’s definitely not about what you own, how you appear to others, or how popular you are. Even the best Snapchat filter won’t increase your value as a human being. And there is no amount of Likes that add up to love.
Here’s what I believe: You matter because you contain within you a great capacity to do good. To act with love.
That can look many different ways: You could dedicate your life to being a criminal defense lawyer, an architect building bright spaces for people without resources, a leader of a movement for freedom or justice, the creator of a start-up that solves a big problem. I’m sure many of you will.
But you don’t need to lead a country to freedom to do good (although in many circles, it’s considered polite to do so if the opportunity arises). Your goodness could just look like a simple act of standing up for someone else.
One of my favorite Upworthy stories is about a woman named Kerri Peek. Kerri’s an Army veteran. She happened to see a Facebook post by the mother of a Muslim girl named Sofia Yassini. Sofia, an 8-year-old, was terrified by the anti-Muslim rhetoric she saw on TV. Kerri posted a picture of herself in uniform on Sofia’s mom’s wall. “Please show this picture of me to your daughter,” she wrote. “Tell her I am a Mama too and as a soldier I will protect her from the bad guys. #Iwillprotectyou” Within hours, hundreds of other soldiers added their voices to say they’d protect Sofia and Muslims in America. And the story reached millions.
There are so many ways to deploy your goodness. But I can promise you: If you organize your life around the question of how to best unleash the goodness inside you, you won’t be disappointed.
So as we conclude, I want to return to your selfie. I don’t have to see it to know that it is a picture of someone that matters. And as we’ve discussed — honoring yourself is truly important. That’s a big piece of what today is about. That’s why we’re all gathered here — to congratulate you, sincerely, for the people that you are, that you’ve come to be.
But unleashing what’s good in you will require broadening your frame. It’s kind of counterintuitive: To be your best self, you have to include others in the picture.
That’s the other way to fight fear: through togetherness. Kerri Peek’s story is a facing-fear-together story. Most great stories are.
As William James said, we are like islands in the sea: separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
So, no Dominican commencement speech would be complete without the mention of the beloved mascot, the penguin. If that isn’t a tradition, I am starting it now, along with speaker selfies.
As any student of “March of the Penguins” knows, penguins are awesome. They can swim faster than a human can run. They can drink ocean water and sneeze out the salt.
And when it gets really, really Antarctic cold, they huddle close to one another. They put the kids on the inside. They rotate turns on the outside, absorbing the chill. They come together. And that’s how they make it through the winter.
So before we close, in just a minute, we’re going to redo the selfie another way. I want you to capture yourself in the context of everyone around, everyone who has travelled this journey with you. Instead of a selfie, let’s call it a “withie.” With your friends. With your classmates. With your professors. With your family. With as many people as you can fit into the frame. The whole context. I’m going to do that too.
Ready, go.
As you move out into your next chapter, this wild and weird future, remember this.
You’re not alone in your frame. You do matter. You have this great power within you to do good and to remind people that they matter too.
If you do that, then truly there’s nothing to be afraid of. Class of 2016, you’re going to do just fine.
We have totally unrealistic expectations of every video we make. Somehow, they deliver.
Like everyone, I’m busy. Between kids and work, I’m lucky if I have two minutes in a day to watch a video on my phone.
So when I do take two minutes to watch a video, it better be damn good. It better grab my attention right away, make me feel something, and stick with me afterward. I don’t look for escapism, I look for elevation — that feeling when a story lifts me up and connects me with something larger, something richer, something more meaningful.
Now, that’s a lot to ask of a two-minute video. But at Upworthy, we demand that of every video we make and share.
Upworthy is a media company on a mission: to change what the world pays attention to by telling truly great stories — increasingly through video. Because we’re all part of the same story, and we intend to help tell that story better than it’s ever been told before.
So here’s our story, told for the first time ever in video. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do:
We’re all about data-informed storytelling at Upworthy, so it should come as no surprise that we watch our numbers closely. And yesterday we saw a pretty amazing number: We hit 200 million Facebook video views in January (205,516,879, to be exact).
The phrase “hockey stick growth” is overused, but this is one of those rare times where it really fits. Take a look:
With a small but mighty team, we’ve gone from 5 million to 200 million in one year.
The most shocking news: We grew from 100 million to 200 million in just three months.
Last year, we launched our first original series, “Humanity for the Win.” And the first two episodes this year, “Hugs Café” and “Second Chance,” already have millions of views and continue to climb. The next Humanity for the Win video will go live next week, and we’re betting it’ll outpace its predecessors.
We’re confident we’ll see even more growth ahead as we expand our serialized content. In the next few months, expect to see two more new original series from Upworthy:
“Testimony,” a series based on the personal stories of individuals breaking down barriers, tackling stereotypes, and confronting life’s ups and downs — all with an interesting twist.
“Another Person’s Shoes,” a no-holds-barred look at a day in the life — struggles, successes, and all — of unique people of different genders, sexualities, cultures, races, socioeconomic statuses, and more.
And we will continue to pilot new formats, including hosted series and animated vignettes.
It’s great news for us because it means our readers are responding to our big business bet — a bold and decisive shift to video. Because it means we are harnessing the most powerful means available to fulfill our mission: sharing stories that matter. Stories like the pay-it-forward pizza shop in Philadelphia that provides food for the homeless, or the dad who lets his daughter paint his nails. They’re vastly different but highlight aspects of humanity that are worth applauding.
Reaching this milestone has been a tremendous team effort, one of constant love, attention to detail, and minute-to-minute strategy. I am so grateful for the work of Thad, Andy, Madeleine, David, Sarah, and Ian. I am forever amazed by the incredible content that Mary, Jordan, and Sonya discover. And I am endlessly wowed by the hi-fi creative that Jess, Alvin, and BJ bring on a daily basis. Thank you all!
Finally, we’re super thankful that there are 200 million people out there who believe we’re all part of the same story.
When you got your daily Upworthy fix this morning, did you notice anything different?
Certainly not the stories and videos — they are as meaningful and delightful as ever.
But you might notice that the Upworthy logo looks different.
We evolved from this:
To this:
Why the change?
We’ve been sharpening our focus at Upworthy lately. You may have read about it. Recruiting amazing people. Moving from curation to original storytelling. Doubling down on video.
Adweek called our video growth “huge.” And POLITICO, “burgeoning.”
As a result, our stories are reaching way more people. Which means lots of fresh eyes. So we decided, after four years of the old logo, that we should have a fresh look to match our fresh focus.
We wanted the Upworthy logo to be more … Upworthy: positive and lively, engaging and innovative, and ever-focused on our bedrock mission of changing what people pay attention to. After looking at lots of different options that were terrific but not quite #Upworthy, we landed here.
You’ll see more photos across all our platforms. Upworthy has always been about visual storytelling, and pictures are an even bigger part of our storytelling with the new logo.
We believe the world works better when people understand each other, see each other, and respect each other. That’s our goal at Upworthy. Because we’re all part of the same story.
I want to thank Michael Bierut and the incredible Pentagram team for their partnership on this project.
They’re super-talented people who totally get what makes Upworthy special.
I’m thrilled with how this turned out.
I hope you think our new look reflects the Upworthy you’ve come to know and love.
For most of last year, Upworthy had a four-person video team — piloting original video storytelling to help us achieve our mission of drawing massive amounts of attention to the stories that really matter. In October, we began investing more heavily in video and are absolutely floored to see how much it’s paying off.
Tubular Labs just revealed its list of most-watched Facebook creators of December 2015,and we were psyched to see that Upworthy ranked in the top 20 (#18, to be exact). It’s our first appearance on the list, having just started our shift last year from curation to original storytelling, and from text-and-image stories to videos. But it shows that we’re on to something big here — and we can’t wait to share some of the stuff we’re working on for the year ahead. But first, let’s look back.
Our most successful Facebook content in 2015 isn’t that surprising given the Tubular ranking — video dominated.
And we’re super excited that the same year we launched Upworthy Originals (original videos rather than curated videos), the #2 spot was an original!
One of our runaway successes of 2015 was a comic (the only non-video to make the list) about the realities of parenting that resonated with millions of people across the world.
Without further ado, here are our top Facebook posts of 2015.
**The post below is a message shared with Upworthy employees earlier today. In the spirit of transparency we’re sharing here as well.
Dear Upworthy team,
We’ve just spoken to 14 of your colleagues and given them the wrenching news that we are eliminating their positions today.
These are people who did good work, worked hard and counted on us for a paycheck. They are our colleagues and friends, and they did nothing wrong. Today’s decisions were driven by strategy, and nothing more. But because of the impact on peoples’ lives, this kind of thing is never an easy call.
We’re confident this is the right strategic move for Upworthy, and one that will put us on a much stronger growth path for years to come. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the people affected today.
We’re going to have an all-staff call this afternoon to share some thoughts and answer your questions. We’ll talk then (and I’ll share a bit more below) about what we’re doing – and what we can all do – for the folks who are leaving Upworthy. But before then, we wanted to lay out what’s happening today and what it means for us going forward.
Today is about a big bet on our video future. That’s the core of it: We’re shifting resources to our video program in order to capture the massive growth opportunity in front of us. Video is now the core growth driver at Upworthy. In fact, every dollar we’re shifting today will go to growing our video business in 2016.
Video is the future of digital advertising – it’s where all of the money is going, and an awful lot of the attention is going. We think there are a few big brands that will own big chunks of that video landscape. But no one owns positive, purposeful storytelling – and that’s where we come in.
This strategy is a continuation of what Upworthy’s been focused on since the beginning. Our video efforts here have been successful because our video team is building on everything we’ve created over the past four years: our hard-won understanding of what works in video, our knowledge of what makes a great story, our data-driven approach to story testing, our clear voice and brand, and our enormous,well-engaged community.
We’re proud of our “small but mighty” video team. But the reality is, if we’re going to truly seize the opportunity, our video business can’t stay small anymore. If we’re serious about video, we have to put serious resources against it. Our ambitions here, and the opportunity before us, are too large for an incremental approach.
This fall, for the first time, we reached more people through video than through our text and pictures storytelling. A few months later, we’re not just reaching more people through video, we’re reaching 10 times more. That’s why we need to act quickly to give video the resources it needs. While these staffing changes are going to cause a decline in traffic to Upworthy.com in the short term, we’ll be reaching significantly more people with our stories every month through our video channels. That helps achieve our mission.
And just to emphasize the scale of the opportunity here: as you know, we started 2015 with 5 million video views. In December, we had 167 million. And in the first seven days of January alone, including a holiday and a weekend, we’ve already driven 65 million views, and counting.
It’s also worth remembering the core strengths of Upworthy that brought us here.
We reach many more people than the great majority of our competitors. And we do that with a far more distinct and compelling voice and brand.
On Upworthy.com, the writing is better – funnier, more incisive and thoughtful, more rich and varied – than it has ever been. And as video drives growth, this will open up more space for our writers to be their creative, hilarious, passionate selves, pioneering new approaches and styles.
Our intel, product, and engineering teams have given us a huge competitive advantage with our predictive testing system, which means that our writers and producers draw more attention and pageviews per person than literally anyone.
We’ve developed deep partnerships with top brands, and thanks to the revenue team’s efforts we have a number of really exciting opportunities teed up for the first half of 2016.
Most importantly – in a landscape full of content generated for no other purpose than to get eyeballs to display ads, we stand out because we stand for something. It remains the case that each and every piece on our site communicates something positive, purposeful, meaningful. That’s extraordinary.
I know that none of that makes today’s changes feel good. The only thing that actually feels good is knowing that we’ll do everything in our power to do right by the people who are leaving.
We’re providing them with severance, health care, and support in their transition. We’ll help them land new gigs, offer enthusiastic references and use our personal networks to connect them with opportunities wherever we can. And we ask each of you to do the same. Any place that hires any of these Upworthians will be lucky to have them.
But today is not an easy day. We’ll miss the people who are leaving, and I’m sure you all will as well.
One of our board members pointed out that most businesses tend to hedge bets.
Great businesses focus aggressively on what they’re great at, even when it means making hard choices.
That’s what we’re doing here. And it’s why after we work through these changes, we can look forward to great days ahead. We’re onto something special: a unique position to bring hundreds of millions of people to meaningful stories everyday, in the most important media battleground of our time.
Without a doubt, today’s changes are hard. But they set us up for a strong future to come – one that we’re excited to build with all of you.
Just a year ago, I was beginning to wonder what the future of Upworthy would look like — how we could combine the power of data with the art of storytelling to do something totally new. Now that it’s been nearly 12 months since those first conversations, it’s a good time to take stock of how far we’ve come in 2015, and how much farther we’ll go in 2016.
But let’s start with the basics.
How do you tell a story? A stranger comes to town. A child goes on a journey. The unexpected happens. Heroes are tested. Hearts are changed. Maybe the world is, too.
But great stories never change, and even though these fundamentals are timeless, we believe there’s ample room for empathetic, human-centered storytelling in our modern, rapidly-changing world. And 2015 was the year when Upworthy embraced this challenge completely.
These are stories of radical empathy. These are the stories we believe in.
At Upworthy, we are in a unique position to advance the art of storytelling by applying sophisticated data analysis to each and every story we publish. That’s how we learn to reach truly massive numbers of people on tough stories — like climate change, social justice, and equality for all.
2015 has been a brand-new chapter in our own story here at Upworthy. It was the year we put all we’ve learned since the company’s founding toward original storytelling. We brought in new voices, we tackled new subjects, and we reached new people — but most of all, we’ve taken everything we’ve learned in the last several years of curating stories to engineer super-shareable stories from scratch.
And it’s working.
But here’s the part that really surprises people:
With a core team of only 20 staff writers, we reach over 25 million unique readers every month. Writers who are used to reaching a few thousand people elsewhere reach millions here. And that’s engineered by design. It’s part of our craft. We build intelligence about how to reach people into every decision, every edit, and every system. And it gets real results. At Upworthy, our stories are shared at a rate of between six and 30 times that of other media companies.
When it comes to sharing, Upworthy punches way above our weight class.
And that’s what we do every day — Upworthy brings massive numbers of people to important but traditionally challenging topics.
To look more deeply within the numbers, we are able to see that people are spending more quality time with Upworthy stories than others’.
When we look at “active visits” (that is, the amount of people who spend real, legitimate time with our stories) our percentage of those real, engaged readers is about 30 points better than the industry average. And it’s still going up, bucking industry trendlines. Any experienced editor can tell you this is a real skill, but when combined with our data infrastructure, it becomes a superpower.
This unique storytelling + data approach is working in Upworthy video, too.
With years of experience curating meaningful videos, Upworthy put that expertise into practice in 2015 by growing our own video team, whose efforts have shown staggering growth. Last January, we were seeing 5 million views a month. By November? That viewership skyrocketed to 125 million views a month — with a tiny video team. Upworthy’s audience for video is growing at a faster rate than other media companies, and at a faster rate than Facebook itself.
Upworthy’s team has evolved, too. Our executive team includes seasoned hands from The Guardian, Thomson Reuters, The New York Times, Discovery Communications, The Daily Beast, and Bloomberg. On our editorial team, we retired the title “curator” and have been building a team of writers — who are a mix of traditional journalists and unexpected talents. In addition to journalists from Gannett, Fusion, and The Huffington Post, we also have found that voices can come from unexpected places like Hallmark Cards or even the world of television and improv comedy. But it’s the combination of all these talents, experimenting together, that has built something truly unique at Upworthy in 2015.
We’ve laid an incredible foundation for the work ahead, and 2016 promises to be a year of even bigger and better.
I won’t bury the lede: I’m ecstatic to welcome Zazie Lucke to our growing leadership team as our new Head of Brand Solutions. Zazie is one of the best in the business, with experience launching and growing the advertising and partnership arms of numerous notable media properties. Here’s a quick rundown of her impressive resume:
Zazie began her career in media at The Week as a marketing coordinator before quickly working her way up to lead the publication’s marketing efforts.
Five years in, she began itching to try something new, so she made the move to Wenner Media, where she oversaw the marketing of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal.
About a year into her Wenner stint, Zazie was recruited to help turn the then-fledgling Atlantic around as an associate publisher of marketing and to put down roots in its newly established office in NYC. Over the next five years, Zazie was instrumental in bringing the Atlantic brand back to profitability and reinvigorating it as a major player in the media space (and I was lucky enough to call her a colleague during that time).
Her success in that role led to a new (executive) one: overseeing marketing for all Atlantic Mediaproperties while also securing major corporate partnerships. During that time, she was part of the small team that launched Quartz,which received some of the best buzz in the industry.
Zazie’s next move was a big one: She was recruited to lead global marketing for all Bloomberg Media properties — building the Bloomberg Media brand and its various products within the ad community and devising data-driven client/brand solutions for marketers across video, digital, print, TV, and radio (among other things) through Bloomberg Denizen, which she was responsible for launching.
Which brings us to today, with Zazie joining Upworthy as our new Head of Brand Solutions. She’ll be responsible for creating innovative, strategic campaign packages for brands, agencies, and nonprofits, while also identifying and developing strategic partnerships. I’ve seen Zazie’s wide-ranging expertise and creativity in action in the past and I’m incredibly excited to welcome her to the Upworthy team. I know she’s the right person to take our brand partnerships to the next level.
I’ll let Zazie weigh in on why she’s equally excited:
Upworthy is a brand I’m incredibly passionate about. The team is building a meteoric media property that leverages smart technology and social media savvy for the greater good. This role is a rare one that both matches my beliefs and has the potential to be an incredibly fulfilling business endeavor. When presented with the opportunity to follow my heart, do something that I can truly dig my hands into, and ultimately have an effect on the business future of a smart, innovative company, there was no way I could pass it up.
Spoken like a true Upworthian. Stay tuned to see what Zazie has in store — I have a feeling it’s going to be phenomenal.
100 days ago, our Editorial Director, Amy O’Leary, laid out her vision for Upworthy: a move from curation to original stories powered by the incredible combination of data science and storytelling arts. And that built on my announcement in March that we’ve moved decisively away from anything resembling clickbait at Upworthy.
What’s happened since? Pretty much exactly what we’d hoped: Upworthy’s traffic has grown, but even more importantly, people are engaging more deeply with more of our stories.
We track this with a metric we call Active Visits — the number of folks who land on the page and read for at least 15 seconds. That may seem like a pretty low bar — just 15 seconds — but the data show that publishers are fooling themselves if they think, “Of course our readers read for more than 15 seconds before leaving.”
At Upworthy, we’ve focused relentlessly on increasing the percentage of visits that are active, and it’s working. That number has gone up consistently.
For the industry as a whole, on the other hand, the Active Visits number has been heading in the wrong direction. According to Chartbeat’s chief data scientist, Josh Schwartz: “Back in 2013, Chartbeat looked at what percentage of visits industry-wide end with less than 15 seconds of engagement and found that it was a full third. Now that number is closer to half.”
That’s a really scary stat for publishers — who presumably want their readers and viewers to actually, y’know, read and view their stories — as well as for advertisers, who are putting dollars on the table in the hopes of people actually seeing their messages.
At Upworthy, our Active Visits percentage is about 30 points better than the industry average. And it’s still going up from there.
What’s our secret? Well, we select, craft, edit, and engineer our stories to optimize for attention — not clicks. We test our stories before we publish them to our full audience, and if people are clicking on a headline but leaving immediately, we won’t publish it until we understand why and fix the problem.
What’s more, we optimize our content to satisfy both the the deep readers and the skimmers. We love it when readers pore over every word we write, but we’re realistic: We know some will and some won’t, and we want the experience to be great both ways.
Here’s Melissa Gilkey, our Head of Editorial Growth, to explain how we do it:
We use structural story elements like images and header text to optimize for “skimmability.” Although it might seem counterintuitive, giving folks the ability to skim more easily actually keeps people on the page longer, since it gives more entry points with which to draw people in. Particularly as more and more of our visitors are on mobile, improving skimmability is key.
We don’t write journalistic articles, we write stories — designed to be engaging, surprising, and captivating, just like a story told around a campfire or at a bar with your friends. We think the traditional “inverted pyramid” structure is simply bad storytelling — the format should be retired for our mobile social era. Making each paragraph less important than the one above it encourages people to leave, not to engage.
At the same time, we strive to reward deeper attention. Even if some folks might skip it, the text below the bolded headers increases our Active Visit rates and shareability even further. For example, with this animal list, we tested a skimmable yet substantial version versus a more traditional “viral site” version with just images. Perhaps surprisingly, the “viral” version did worse — way worse. Adding substance but making sure it was skimmable drove up Active Visits and shareability.
At Upworthy, we’re on a mission to tell stories that bring people together. For that to work, people have to actually read, skim, or watch the whole story. So every time we find a new way to craft stories that increases our Active Visits percentage, that’s a big win for our mission — and a hopeful sign for all of us who believe deeply in the power of stories to make the world better.
We’re thrilled to announce that Robin Wilson, previously our Vice President of Operations, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer.
Robin joined Upworthy in 2014 as the VP of Operations. From building and managing the company budget to overseeing every aspect of our onboarding process, no challenge is too big or too small for her to solve.
Robin specializes in the intersection of media and technology. Her acute business sense and keen ability to focus on the heart of the matter are some of the reasons we’re so excited about this promotion. But she is also much more than that:
She’s as equally adept at driving the big-picture strategy as running point on day-to-day details. She has a rare and borderline magical ability to make impossible things seem possible and quickly understand how the 50,000-foot view will work at sea level.
She’s incredibly business- and tech-savvy. If you asked her to develop a five-year business plan, write code, or think through our product strategy, she’d hit it out of the park.
She’s able to get more done in one day than most people get done in a week. She tackles all the daily tasks while simultaneously taking on a ton of one-off projects and putting out fires. Somehow, she also remains a constant source of situationally appropriate GIFs. We’re not sure she actually sleeps.
Prior to joining Upworthy, Robin was Head of Revenue Operations at Vimeo and was an early employee at both Blip Networks (acquired by Maker Studios in 2013) and Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo in 2010). We knew it was a coup when we recruited her in 2014, which is why we want to say it again: We’re super excited for Robin, and we can’t wait to see her kick even more ass as our COO!
Ouch! This afternoon’s Gawker post alleging union hypocrisy at Upworthy was tough to read.
Here’s what’s true and what’s not.
It is true our writers considered unionizing. It is true they so far have not. But just about everything else in the story is, well, Gawker.
Gawker “alleges” that we recently laid off six people. Actually, it was quite public – you can read our statement in this legit news story — it wasn’t a reduction in force, it was a transition to a different skill set.
Some of our employees were understandably jarred, and that led to a unionization conversation. No union vote was ever taken.
Peter and I are proud supporters of collective bargaining. And if our employees ever decide to unionize – we will support their decision. With enthusiasm. Because we believe in organized labor, as a right and as a force for good in society.
But the timing of any such effort really matters for the people of Upworthy. There is a reason why unionization efforts are usually undertaken at larger enterprises (such as Gawker). Unionizing right now, at this point in our growth (we’re still investor-funded) would threaten our plan to continue to expand the team (we’re at 80 now and recruiting for more than 10 positions right now). Our business is growing but the majority of our funding still comes from investors, and we will need to execute on big plans to achieve our mission of drawing lots of attention to important social topics.
Everyone here at Upworthy cares deeply about that mission, and we’re growing again, with a clear, shared set of strategies and objectives. And in the end, our writers decided it wasn’t the right time.
Peter and I don’t assume that means never, nor do we think it should. In the meantime, we will continue to hold ourselves accountable to our employees, whether they unionize or not. And that is one reason why our folks have unlimited vacation, vacation bonuses, no-deductible health insurance, maternity and paternity leave and an unusually generous stock plan. We took those steps long before the recent union conversations, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s too bad that didn’t make the Gawker story.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is known for tackling the really tough problems — problems like extreme poverty and substandard health care in developing countries. That’s something we really respect. But we’re just as excited that the Gates Foundation is tackling what might be the toughest problem of all: getting people to pay attention to these epic problems.
Because one thing we’ve learned at Upworthy is this: Unless important, serious issues are communicated in a savvy way — employing smart combinations of contemporary data utilization and classic storytelling skill — they just don’t stand a chance versus the cat videos, celebrity gossip, and viral memes that dominate the online media landscape. Like it or not, we are all knee-deep in what our Editorial Director Amy O’Leary calls “a street fight for attention.”
Over the last 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to take on that street fight with the Gates Foundation, through All 7 Billion, a special Upworthy/Gates Foundation series that aims to bring awareness to global health and poverty issues.
Global health and poverty — not always the easiest topics to talk about!
But since the series began last fall, Upworthy has brought over a billion seconds of attention to the issues of global health and poverty — stories about global hunger, sanitation, infant mortality, reproductive health, refugee care, worker rights, and malaria.
ONE. BILLION. SECONDS. To put that number in perspective, that’s…
Longer than the entire durations of the Xin and Qin dynasties combined.
16.7 million minutes — or over 275,000 hours — of continuous, uninterrupted attention.
That’s a lot of attention! But what does it really mean? Are we just capturing people’s attention, or are we really moving hearts and minds on these critically important global issues?
We decided to find out.
We’ve been surveying a small subset of our users to measure whether all of this attention time has led to real changes in people’s knowledge, awareness, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. And across dozens of surveys, we’ve found overwhelming evidence that it does.
A sample of our results is shown below. In each of the next four graphs, we compare exposed users, who spent at least 30 seconds paying attention to relevant content, to two control groups. The site-wide control group consists of Upworthy visitors in general, and the pre-content control group includes Upworthy visitors who had similar browsing behavior as the exposed group.
(Fig. 1, Above) After users were exposed to Gates Foundation content, they became significantly more knowledgeable of key facts about tough issues, including childhood marriage. (See footnote for sample sizes and statistics.)
(Fig. 3, Above) Upworthy’s unique style of storytelling leads users to feel more empathy for people around the world affected by difficult issues, such as the global hunger crisis.
(Fig 4., Above) And viewing Upworthy stories doesn’t just affect people’s hearts and minds — it also motivates behavior, like seeking additional information, sharing stories with friends and family, signing petitions, donating money, and volunteering time.
Exposure to the content is moving hearts and minds, but how much attention time is enough attention time?
Apparently, the more, the better.
(Fig. 5-10, Above) Attention time correlates with just about every meaningful metric we have examined across almost every issue. The more time Upworthy users spend paying attention to our stories on global health and poverty, the more knowledgeable they become, the more they care about important global issues and the people who are affected by them, and the more likely they become to take concrete steps to improve these conditions.
Bringing massive amounts of attention to “stories that matter” isn’t just a tagline at Upworthy. And attention time isn’t just another metric or buzzword. It’s all about using data and drama together to help shift the hearts and minds of millions of people about our world’s most pressing issues and challenges.
-Sean Wojcik, Ph.D., Research Scientist at Upworthy
